Free For All – Natural Earth Data

It has been a while since I featured a collection of free vector and raster files, so let’s reverse that trend this month. The folks at Natural Earth Data have a very nice collection of free GIS data that is both easy to download and also offered in various scales. This collection of free data is pretty self explanatory so let me give our readers a sense of what you can download in either small, medium or large scale:

A sample of the large-scale Natural Earth 1 with Shaded Relief dataset (no water is included in this version) over the Midwest of the United States.

Cultural Layers

Country boundaries and administrative units

Disputed areas

Populated places

Railroads

Airports

Ports

Urban areas

Parks and protected lands

Timezones

Physical

Coastline

Land masses

Minor islands

Reefs

Ocean

Rivers and lakes

Major physical features

Playas

Ice shelves and glaciers

Bathymetry

Worldwide color and grey-scale raster backgrounds

Until my next edition of Free For All, happy hunting for free geospatial goodies!